One of the PalmOS browsers worked this way, doing pre-rendering at the other end to help compensate for a slow connection and a small device. If the ISP's server farm went down, so did your web browser.

I've used a satellite Internet provider that did similar as well, parsing the HTML at the provider ground station so it could fetch all the needed objects and send them in a single stream to the sky. This eliminated a lot of repeated fetch requests from the client over sat, whi

Dude we know for a fact that all the Tier-1 traffic in the US already gets repeated to the NSA, why would they need a peek? Now the FBI might want a look, but for them to be able to do anything with it they need a warrant (even if it is a expost facto FISA warrant).

I'm somewhat confused. Why would they care? You're talking about a small percentage of web browser usage compared with all other browsers and platforms. Not only that but this is just a small percentage of the network traffic. What about instant messages, bittorrent and other formats of communication some of which will be completely bespoke?

No, I call bullshit. Some conspiracy theorists will happily sling around that an agency has their claws on the data but when you realise it is such a small percentage of

You could just as well argue it increases privacy, since Amazon becomes a proxy service. So instead of your 1-page request hitting 10 companies' servers, each of which collects information on you, now they see a bunch of hits from Amazon.

Of course, google probably aggregates information from those ten servers anyway, and Amazon probably sells the information they collect on you anyway, and the government is probably monitoring everybody involved in any case...

What about handling secure (https) connections?We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com./ [siteaddress.com.]

Still a bit vague, but not the part about "from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf". But in this case nothing can be assumed - it's their browser, so they can implement the client to cloud connection however they want. Let's just hope they do it securely (even if, unlik

Is it really a performance bump, though? I mean, when have you ever felt the load time for a page accessed through broadband was too slow?

If the Kindle Fire was running on a 33MHz Dragonball and accessing the net through a 14.4kbps modem, I could understand the need for this. But with a dual-core 1.2GHz processor and high-speed broadband, why do we need this? I'm still slightly confused at Amazon using this as a selling point... (or perhaps it's a case of needing a selling point other than price, and dr

If it gives as much of a boost as Opera mini then it will be well worth it. One of the biggest performance increases comes from javascript being run on their servers before they send the page to your device. They give any onLoad events 2 seconds to fire and then cancel them so you don't get pages hung up waiting for flaky javascript that has hung for some reason or another. Any on page javascript is also processed on the server which massively reduces the load on the device itself.

Users of noscript have long benefitted from fast loading of web pages as distracting ads pulled from other domains were suppressed.

If entire web pages are "constructed in the cloud" and then presented to users, the additional overhead of ads,including annoying animation, would once again turn perfectly readable pages into aggravating distractions thateventually drive readers away. Anyone remember answer.com? AskJeeves? Or cnn.com before noscript?

Even on pages that do pull in a lot of ads using javascript if this works anything like Opera Mini they won't be a problem. Opera Mini gives any javascript 2 seconds and then bins it which means an ad server that is slow to respond won't slow the page load down. All the javascript is run in the cloud and only a flat page is pushed out to the device so there isn't any overhead for javascript.

I grew up attached to a computer. I have ad blocking in my wetware. I simply don't even notice web advertisements anymore, unless they have sound.

I did recently start using adblock, but that was because I started noticing increased load times and companies tracking me with social media buttons. My visual cortex started filtering out banner ads years ago.

When you request a page in Opera Mini, the request is sent to the Opera Mini server that then downloads the page from the Internet. The server then packages your page up in a neat little compressed format (we call it OBML), ready to send back to your phone at the speed of ninjas on jetpacks.

You're absolutely correct that the basic "innovation" here is exactly what Opera Mini (note, not Turbo - specifically Mini) has done for ages. So all talk about "redefining the browser tech" is pure marketspeak, and both the submitter and the editor should be ashamed of spinning it the way Amazon PR wanted them to.

However, there is one crucial difference with Mini here: it also does work as a full-fledged local browser. Mini always does layout and other optimizations "in the cloud", and fetches the result. That's why it's so bad at JS, Flash, HTML5 etc - if it's something that has to run locally, it's not supported. Here, they are transparently offloading work on the server, but when there is something in the page that cannot be handled well that way - or when the server is not available - it gets rendered locally, same as in any other browser. So it's supposed to be completely transparent to the user, unlike Opera.

Of course, we haven't actually seen how well that it all works in practice, and I'll reserve my judgement until then. It'll be interesting to sniff traffic and see how much actually gets preprocessed; right now my suspicion is that on any script-heavy website, it'll mostly just do compression.

Lets face it, us few Opera users are used to living a couple of years in the future.

Mind you until 27 Septembet 2012 I sometimes got upset but since the new law enacted two days ago put to death all IE/Chrome and Firefox users (Lynx users already got their punishment through usage) I am a lot more mellow about it.

Please, explain to me how it differs? I've read over the linked article and I don't see anything amazingly different? It can render locally or on the EC2 cloud (like turbo). I will agree there is the addition of "learning". Is there something else we're missing?

Also, not an opera fanboy here. I tried opera mini when it came out. I'm a FF/Chrome fanboy.

so - if i have a hammer and i use it to nail a chair leg back on and then turn and use it to nail a table leg back on i've "refined" what?

so Opera's reason for doing this was to conserve bandwidth (image compression was only part of it) the other large but was the overhead of the requests and also the optimization of space in the transmission.

Amazon's is to optimize the data prior to the device.

they both do the same thing with minimally different options - so yes Amazon did what Opera has been doing for yea

Not that I approve of windows mobile, and it was a horrible experience, but -

I had a Windows phone in about 2004. I compiled mame for it, and it could play some games tolerably fast. The UI layout was xml based and could be adapted. It had a camera module and a reasonably high def screen, and could take MMC-RS cards to play video and music. Definitely a smartphone by any description you choose to apply to it, and it was far from the only one.

We heard you like the cloud, so we put the cloud in your cloud so you can swear while you disconnect!

The next version of silk won't need a client at all. The cloud will be able to take the place of the user's device as well. Sure, you might end up spending thousands of dollars on items from Amazon you wouldn't have ordered, but think of the time savings!

This is ridiculously old technology. Just about every other mobile browser does this now other than maybe IE on Windows phones and Safari on IOS. BlackBerry's have been doing this since 2005, as someone else mentioned Opera has had it since 2009, Bolt Browser has this feature as well. So I am to believe that a browser technology that's been around for 6 years is redefining browsers now? Way to grab on to an old feature and herald it as something new and ground breaking.

This is ridiculously old technology...BlackBerry's have been doing this since 2005...

Uh, wow. Maybe I'll hold off altogether on this "new" tech then. Seems in the battle of browser wars to find the fastest, easiest, and most efficient one out there, I don't ever hear someone exclaim "Oooh, you should go get a Blackberry!"...

What about handling secure (https) connections?
We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com/ [siteaddress.com] ).

So essentially, they become the man-in-the-middle so they can better cache your HTTPS content? And their browser is programmed to show this is acceptable/secure... What kind of privacy implications does this introduce? Even if their privacy policy says they won't use the data maliciously, cloud computing isn't a bullet-proof system (i.e., leaks, hacking incidents, etc.). Call me paranoid, but if I read this right, this sounds like a frightening idea.

...not a complete caching of HTTPS content (which would be pretty futile). There would only be an issue if, say, the CA system of validating what server you are talking to has got a leak, because then Amazon(/any attacker controlling (part) of the EC2 server park) could theoretically perform a real MITM (barring any legal consequences, of course). But hey, the CA system is perfect... erm... never mind...

What about handling secure (https) connections?
We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com/ [siteaddress.com] ).

So essentially, they become the man-in-the-middle so they can better cache your HTTPS content? And their browser is programmed to show this is acceptable/secure... What kind of privacy implications does this introduce? Even if their privacy policy says they won't use the data maliciously, cloud computing isn't a bullet-proof system (i.e., leaks, hacking incidents, etc.). Call me paranoid, but if I read this right, this sounds like a frightening idea.

Iif they put themselves as a man in the middle that sees your banking account credentials, credit card numbers, etc, all their servers that are involved in this should be subject to the kind of security standards and regulations that are required of sites that handle credit card numbers...

If this is only at the TCP level, essentially forwarding all encrypted traffic unaltered, then there is no issue.

But looking at the content is very serious. If the browser shows that it sends the data encrypted to example.com, but in fact it sends them in cleartext to proxy.amazon.com, it's a ridiculous security hole. I doubt they are doing this.

Basically, what this service does is make a "google maps" version of the webpage -- cutting pages up into tiles (like the Nintendo NES did) and streaming them over a wireless connection from their reserved-for-holidays EC2 data centers. Some localized bastardization is involved, but the "google maps" img tiling is the basis of it.

A quick wget of the cnn.com front page yields 2.10 MB of data. And yes, it's less to tile it -- a screenshot at 1400x900, for about 40% of the page, converts into a lossless PNG file for about 700K of data. A lossy but usable 90-quality JPEG is around 350K. The processing time and RAM to bit blit that client-side of course will be a lot less than a modern ACID 2/3 browser would require.

But as sites become more dynamic, the response time to constantly stream pixels won't be worth it. And a lot of sites rely on being dynamic -- view the HTML source on Facebook some time, it's almost all JS. Even slashdot (famous for being HTML3 well into the 2000's) now feeds its stories dynamically with javascript and HTML5.

This isn't "redefining browser tech," it's probably a stopgap measure for their current market-undercutting $199 tablet processor. Anything JS/HTML5 runs fine on my dated Athlon X2 laptop on Chromium or Iceweasel, and that kind of speed will easily be in tablets in 1-2 years. Amazon says Fire is "dual core" but it's probably skimpy CPU-wise and/or RAM-wise. Or maybe their attempt to reinvent the wheel by rolling their own browser engine under NIH syndrome instead of using Webkit or Gecko just turned out badly.

"Software Development Engineers - SPDYSPDY is an open source network transport protocol which we have leveraged in the design of Amazon Silk. In this role, you will have end-to-end ownership of our use of SPDY. You will be expected to have strong familiarity with the protocol and to use that knowledge to come up with innovative ways to improve the customer experience. We're looking for strong team players who thrive in a startup-like environment where flexibility is essentia

Opera turbo uses compression via opera's servers. Amazon's thing uses amazon's servers to render. With opera the point is to get around a slow connection on the consumer's side. Amazon's point is to do the render processing on amazon's side. Let's take an annoyingly busy website, for example: http://home.sina.com/ [sina.com] Now this beast can take a while to download and get ready, especially on a low power handheld thing like a tablet. Amazon's silk method should prep all those parts for the displaying device.

Opera turbo uses compression via opera's servers. Amazon's thing uses amazon's servers to render. With opera the point is to get around a slow connection on the consumer's side. Amazon's point is to do the render processing on amazon's side. Let's take an annoyingly busy website, for example: http://home.sina.com/ [sina.com] Now this beast can take a while to download and get ready, especially on a low power handheld thing like a tablet. Amazon's silk method should prep all those parts for the displaying device.

Um, yeah. So it does work exactly like Opera Turbo does. Opera turbo also down-sampled images to a lower resolution or lower number of colors which helped cut the download sizes quite a bit.

You do realize that in order to compress the data, Opera's servers have to render it first? The two technologies are more similar than they are dissimilar. From what I recall, Opera's approach is to pre-render on a proxy server, compress the end result, and send down to the device as a compact binary stream, and Silk appears to be doing pretty much the exact same thing but without any additional compression that I saw mentioned.

In any case, both have to pre-render the page and Opera's approach also removes

new [noo, nyoo] Show IPA adjective, -er, -est, adverb, nounadjective1. of recent origin, production, purchase, etc.; having but lately come or been brought into being: a new book.2. of a kind now existing or appearing for the first time; novel: a new concept of the universe.3. having but lately or but now come into knowledge: a new chemical element.4. unfamiliar or strange (often followed by to ): ideas new to us; to visit new lands.5. having but lately come to a place, position, status, etc.: a reception

If Amazon really wants to aggregate your information they'll keep Opera Mini - and all browsers for Android - out of the Kindle Fire store. Don't forget that you can only get apps from the Amazon store, and Amazon can and will decide what you can get.

seriously were not running 486's here aside from slashdots javabloat every other site does not suck on modern machines, hell if you can stand not pissing you pants even slashdot only takes about a min on a 300mhz PPC

So long?? It takes less than a minute on a Cyrix P-166 running firefox 1.0 and Win95 (yeah, baby!) (don't laugh -- it's the only machine we've got at work that still has ISA slots, which we need for a bit of equipment....)

But I agree wholeheartedly with the point. Why would anyone wish to jeopardise their privacy to save a few seconds (max) of waiting for a webpage to load? The fact that Amazon can use this as a selling point is a sad statement on current attitudes to privacy.

It also uses its algorithms to know which links you'll most likely click on (based on what others have clicked on) and starts pre-fetching that data so if/when you click on the link it'll take even less time to load.

Unlike other pre-fetching technology that had no intelligence built in this sounds very awesome.

So not only does Amazon see all the data I'm loading, but they keep a record of it too??? What could possibly go wrong here?

You get one SSL connection from your phone to the Amazon server, and they get one from the Amazon server to the destination server with your credentials. So you have to trust Amazon not abusing their position by stealing your private keys. But Amazon pretends in their FAQ that their presence in the chain isn't a risk factor at all.